Wearable mobile devices, such as smartwatch devices, are designed to provide the wearer ready access to information. Accordingly, wearable device users desire the ability to quickly and easily read information from the device, as well as a convenient mechanism to provide command input to the wearable device. Sensor-based gestures are one method of enabling wearable device functionality. However, the various devices and controllers used to enable sensor-based gestures consume power, and increase the overall power requirement of the wearable device. Accordingly, extensive use of sensors for gesture-based input can reduce the overall battery life of the device.
In some smart-watch wearable devices known in the art, sensors are placed in a low power state to reduce power draw. However, when the device's sensors are in a low power state, the device may not be able to wake the sensors in time to recognize incoming gestures, and may require additional interaction (e.g., hardware buttons) to wake the device. An alternative solution to a hardware button is increasing sensor wakeup sensitivity to avoid missed input. However, increasing the wake sensitivity of the sensors may result in a gesture detection system that is overly sensitive and prone to false positives, which in turn result in spurious sensor wake events that further deplete the device battery.
An overview of embodiments is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the figures.